❮ Projects page The Food Trust

Spatial Analysis Project:

Working with neighborhoods, schools, grocers, farmers and policymakers, The Food Trust has developed a comprehensive approach to improve food access that combines nutrition education and greater availability of affordable, healthy food. As part of our comprehensive approach we run 27 farmers’ markets in low and mixed-income areas, developed a Healthy Corner Store Network with over 500 stores, and provide nutrition education lessons at over 150 sites across the city. For Summer of Maps, we propose a three phase project:

• First, the fellow will define a set of community categories based on socioeconomic and geographic factors such as access to public transportation or income.
• Second, create a comprehensive list of locations where we program and attach a score to each location based on the amount and type of programming provided at each site.
• Lastly, create an index for each community category based on how much programming is provided to each community.

Data available:

• The Food Trust programming layers, including corner stores, farmers’ markets, schools, community sites.
• US census data including income, age, race and ethnicity, transportation to work
• Comprehensive list of supermarkets, corner stores and farmers’ markets in Philadelphia (Nielsen and Open Data Philly)

Maps and Reports that will be created:

We would like both static and dynamic maps that illustrate the community categories and our programming presence. The dynamic map should contain all produced layers so it can be explored later to inform future programming and used to conduct further analysis.

Static map products should:

• Display communities with their associated category, paired with a report explaining the reasoning behind each category (the data used to create the community categories).
• Display programming sites with associated values that indicate the intensity of our presence, paired with a report explaining the reasoning behind the index (the data decisions used to rate the intensity of programming / create the program location index).

How the maps and reports will be used:

We intend to use the maps and information in the following ways

• Make them available on a website for internal decision making, public policy makers and the general public
• Provide them to stakeholders as part of the reports and grants we produce on a regular basis to track our impact
• Use these reports/maps to identify areas where more or less programming is needed
• Guide us in a follow up study which will examine how much nutrition education dosage community members are receiving and how far community members travel to certain destinations. This will inform our understanding how saturated an area is with programming.